 Welcome friends and visitors to Monet Café. This is an artistic happy place, I like to think, and a place where many people can grow and learn about art online from the convenience of our homes. We're going to do a little experimenting today, something if you've been on my channel long, you know I like to do. And this is the reference photo I'm using, which is just a picture of a field in the back of my art studio. And this is the resulting painting, which was created on a homemade surface that I used to apply the soft pastels. So let's get started and I think you're going to love it. As a matter of fact, I already know some of you are excited about this because I shared the painting and the product on our Facebook group, Monet Café Art Group. And I think you're going to love this new method for creating your own pastel surfaces for painting. Now here's my setup and I'm just using a piece of regular watercolor paper. And here is the product. It is made by Golden Fluid Acrylics and it's called macacus iron oxide. I sure hope I'm saying that right. I saw another artist using this and it looked like beautiful results so I thought I would try it. And I just bought the one ounce little bottle because I wasn't sure yet whether or not I was going to really like this product. But I'm definitely going to buy a bigger supply of this. Just showing my hinge system here. When you use watercolor paper, a lot of times it will warp when liquid is applied. So this allows me to lift it up and there's a neat little trick to put water on the back which will keep it from warping too much. I'm using the smooth side by the way. Oh and here's my little trough system homemade with just aluminum foil to catch the pastel dust. I often like to use a mat just to get, I'm going to be doing a five by seven size. So it's a quick and easy way to just mark it out so you don't have to measure and get a ruler out and everything. Now I'm going to start applying the product here and I do want to mention that it did warp a bit. I ended up being okay with it. I think I might still try watercolor paper but I end up, I want you to stay tuned till the end and I'm going to show you how I apply it on some mat board. It's really neat sometimes to make your own pastel surfaces on a board rather than paper like watercolor paper or mixed media paper because it's sturdier. You'll see as right now as I'm applying this you can see it starting to warp and I do my little trick like I mentioned putting the water on the back. It flattened it out a little bit but there were still a little bit a little bit of warping going on there. So that's why I did the boards at the end just to have a few ready because I love this product. It's very fun. I thought I would go ahead and show you where you can get this product. Of course a lot of us get our supplies from DickBlick.com. They do have this product. I actually got the little one ounce bottle that you see in the video from Amazon. I wanted to just get a little one ounce bottle to try it and they noticed here they did not have that on here. So if you see here from DickBlick.com is that's bottom four darker gray sections there. They have this available in a four ounce, eight ounce, sixteen and thirty-two ounce. Obviously you get more bang for your buck the more that you buy but you may not want to buy a big quantity of it until you play around with it. Again you can get a one ounce bottle on Amazon. Here is where you will see where I'm showing it. It's a little bit warped and I'm going to do my technique for applying some water. I'm just using a foam brush and I'm lifting it up. Again this is just watercolor paper and I'm applying water to the back. You just want to get a pretty good coat of water on it. The paper absorbs it and then what happens is it just works the opposite way. It starts to warp the other way so it kind of straightens everything out. But again and now that I've already created this I can let you know it did still have a little bit of warping to it. So you'll see in a minute I end up cutting it out a little bit better and taping it down so it wasn't so warped to work on. I like to show my pastel selection and if you've seen many of my videos you know I veer away quite a bit or quite often from the actual local color that's in the reference photo or what I'm looking at to paint. And I like to enhance color a bit so I really wanted to do work with these teals and magenta's. Now here you can see what I was speaking about how I ended up cutting it cutting it down and taping it down a little bit better. I cut those edges that weren't covered off and it was it helped me to be able to kind of flat it out a little bit with that additional support at the bottom with the tape. Alright so now I'm going to get started with the actual painting and that I'm speeding this up because this video is more about the product and creating your own pastel surface. Sometimes I'll do paintings in real time but often right there all I'm doing is a just a little sketch. Sometimes it helps me with just kind of getting an idea of how I want to create the composition. The photo isn't always exactly what I want. I wanted to move that horizon line up a little bit more into the upper third rather than right on the middle halfway point. So I'm going to talk a little bit more about some of the reasoning why we make our own pastel surfaces and maybe a little bit while I'm painting but for the most part enjoy the painting and I will give you more input at the end about this product. So I finished up this little painting and I actually I made some changes. I actually ended up scrubbing out the front a little bit, applying a little bit of fixative in the foreground and I was really impressed with how well this pastel or golden product did as a pastel surface. I really didn't experience any lack of being able to layer maybe up until the very end and so I will definitely use this product again but what I want to share with you here is how I'm making my own boards. Like I said at the beginning with the watercolor paper warping I thought matte board might be a good. I use matte board a lot to create my own surfaces and I thought this might be a good way to use this product. So I'm just going to kind of show you real quickly a couple of different things I did using this product to make my own pastel boards. Now notice I've cut a couple of different sizes here. I just happen to have a piece of matte board that I cut into. I believe these are six by eight sizes. I like that size. It's not too big not too small and I had some little ones left over for some of the artist trading card sizes that are three two and a half by three and a half and three and a half by two and a half and I thought why not make it all at the same time while I have this product out. So as you can see I'm pretty much doing the same method that I did with the watercolor paper and I'm using the foam brush which gives you more of a smooth texture. You don't have as much lines and I'm going to show you another thing that I do after this board but I also I think I think I have a little footage at the end where I show you the painting and and the boards and show how there is that little you can't appreciate it in the video but there is that little shimmering effect. It has a glistening kind of a look to it which is really neat. And now since I'm experimenting why not experiment some more. I thought it might be interesting. I know the the Mycaceous iron oxide is already dark so I wasn't sure if I could tint it but I'm going to try and I love using the golden product that is the Quinacridone Gold. It is such a beautiful beautiful luminous color a warm underpainting kind of feel and I thought let's let's go ahead and try adding it to the iron oxide. So I just I got a little dish and I put in a few drops enough that I thought would cover this board. Now I'm going to put in the Quinacridone Gold. Oh not yet I added more of that but I don't want to add too much of the Quinacridone Gold because I don't want to dilute the iron oxide so much that I lose that grit. Again that's the reason we use certain products to make pastel surfaces because they have a grit a tooth that the pastels can hold on to. This particular product the Fluid Acrylic Golden Quinacridone Gold I'm mixing to get a little color and it didn't lighten up that much. I mean it still had a little bit of a gold tone but if you just use that Quinacridone Gold on the board it would not work for pastel surface because it doesn't have any grit. Now I have another video and another method that I use using that product to get that beautiful golden color with some grit. I use another product Fine Pumice but for now I thought I'd try mixing this with the iron oxide. See it's still very dark but can you see a little bit of that that golden color underneath it and if I was to really press hard with this I could even achieve that that warmer color almost like an amber color even more. So you know I'm glad I did it and I think I will enjoy having the dark board and the one that's a little warmer. So that there you go that's what happens it's already such a dark color that if you try adding other tints from other acrylic paints it's going to not lighten up the way you might hope it would. Now what I'm going to do is actually I sometimes like using a brush rather than a foam brush. Many people like that smooth application I sometimes like the texture. So this is my favorite little really old bristly hard scratchy kind of a brush and now I'm just going to do the exact same thing with a brush rather than a foam brush and you'll see it gives a more textured look. Same same deal though. I believe I add the Quinacridone gold to this as well. Yeah I do because I kind of like that. So check out this technique and then I'll show you all the boards at the end. Okay well that was so fun and I again will definitely use this product again. I really like the result of it but here are the boards that I made and I'm kind of I'm trying to zoom in so you can get an indication of the glistening glistening effect. You really see it on the gray and actually I think that would be a reason if you like that using just the gray without tinting it with the Quinacridone gold may be a good idea. And here's one of the boards a little bit closer. Can you see that glisten? I hope it comes through on video because it really is neat and beautiful. I love this product and unfortunately I don't think you can see the little glistening effect that this painting has but I thought I'd show you a little close-up here anyway. It really does in real life. You can see little sparkles in your painting so I hope you guys liked this. I think you're gonna really enjoy this product so give it a try. Please subscribe and come back often and happy happy painting.